US President Donald Trump is due to meet with Vladimir Putin's top diplomat at the White House in what could be the highest level, face-to-face contact with Russia so far in the new presidency, a US official and a person with knowledge of the plan says.
Trump's talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are due to take place on Wednesday, an anonymous official told The Associated Press, while the White House declined to comment.
A Russian plan to stabilise Syria after more than six years of civil war is the most urgent foreign policy topic on the agenda at the meeting, which comes a day after Trump abruptly fired FBI chief James Comey, amid a bureau investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
US intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of meddling to help Trump's chances of victory.
Less than a month into Trump's presidency, he fired his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, saying Flynn misled senior administration officials about his pre-inauguration talks with Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador in Washington.
In a Senate hearing Monday, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates said she bluntly warned Trump's White House in January that Flynn "essentially could be blackmailed" by the Russians because he apparently had lied to his bosses about his contacts with Kislyak.
Trump has said he has no ties to Russia and isn't aware of any involvement by his aides in any Russian election interference. He calls the various investigations a "hoax" driven by Democrats still bitter that their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was defeated last year.
But in the meantime, his hopes for a possible rapprochement with Moscow, so regularly repeated on the campaign trail, have been derailed. Ties soured further in April after the US blamed a Russian ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, for a deadly chemical weapons attack on civilians and Trump fired some 60 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in response.
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